The current homesteading trend looks incredibly aesthetic on social media. You see glowing videos of people collecting fresh eggs in cute aprons and baking sourdough bread from scratch. It all seems incredibly idyllic and peaceful until you remember what actually goes into processing your own livestock. A twenty five year old guy recently shared a story on Reddit that shatters that peaceful illusion, and the internet is absolutely horrified by how he handled a deeply traumatic family situation.
The Original Poster and his twenty five year old wife recently decided to start growing and processing their own meat. Their breaking point with the commercial meat industry happened when the wife found a massive blood clot inside a chicken thigh from the grocery store. Since the husband grew up on a farm, he knew this was a sign the bird had been mistreated while alive. To combat the cruelty and the rising grocery prices, they decided to take matters into their own hands.
They took their new farm to table lifestyle very seriously. Not long after getting started, they processed their very first bird. The husband even reached out to a Kosher butcher to learn how to do the deed as humanely and properly as possible. They have a veterinarian check the flock every three months to ensure the meat is safe. All of this sounds like highly responsible, ethical agriculture. But things took a very dark turn when the husband’s twelve year old brother came to stay for winter break.
The young boy’s visit unluckily overlapped with the couple’s designated slaughter day. The husband and wife were preparing their meat for the final day before Lent, as they fast from all animal products leading up to Easter. Instead of making sure the preteen was safely occupied inside the house with a movie or video games, the adults simply went outside and got to work.
The twelve year old had absolutely no idea what his brother and sister in law were doing in the yard. He wandered into what the author bizarrely calls the sacrificing area at the exact moment his older brother made the very first lethal cut. Seeing a live bird get its neck sliced open is essentially a horror movie scene for a middle school kid who is used to eating dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets.
Absolute chaos instantly ensued. The little brother understandably started screaming and crying in horror. This is the exact moment where the older brother goes from being slightly irresponsible to completely callous. Instead of dropping his tools, covering the animal, and comforting the hysterical child, the husband and wife just kept right on working.
They completely ignored the sobbing child for an entire hour because they felt they had a job to do. Leaving a preteen to panic and cry alone for sixty minutes after witnessing a graphic slaughter is wild behavior. Only after the area was completely cleaned up did the older brother finally sit the kid down for a chat. He delivered a profound lecture about how we must respect the animals that die to put food on our plates.
Unsurprisingly, a lecture about respecting the food chain did not magically cure the fresh trauma. The little brother, still actively sobbing, declared he was swearing off meat forever and begged to be taken back to his parents’ house immediately. The older brother obliged and drove him home, which obviously ignited a massive and entirely predictable family explosion.
The mother rightfully lost her mind when her youngest son walked through the front door weeping about dead chickens. She went completely ballistic on her oldest son for traumatizing the boy. The husband tried to defend himself by arguing that a twelve year old is plenty old enough to understand the truth about where meat comes from. He insisted that the boy’s sudden choice to become a vegetarian was not his fault.
He entirely missed the point of why his mother was furious. Yes, children should absolutely learn that food comes from farms and not just plastic packages at the supermarket. But they do not need surprise front row tickets to a graphic backyard execution to learn that lesson.
The internet is completely siding with the furious mother. The older brother is definitely the ahole in this scenario. Being ethical about your meat consumption does not give you a free pass to ignore a screaming child for an hour. If you are going to run a slaughterhouse in your backyard, you need to lock the gate when guests are over. How would you react if your sibling traumatized your kid like this? Sound off in the comments!